The idea was elegant in its simplicity. On any given day, thousands of pregnant White females walked into abortion clinics; thousands of precious White children were executed in secret. The Hall of Shame would shine a light on these crimes.
The abortionist plies his trade behind closed doors, Victor wrote. Those who commission these murders count on his discretion.
The writing came easy to him. He had always been good with words.
They present themselves to the world as responsible employees, neighbors, wives, and even mothers. Do you recognize these faces?
Getting the photos was easy. Every major American city had an abortion clinic, or several; every pro-life American had a cell phone in his pocket. Victor put out a call on 8chan. Within hours, he had an army of volunteers. The response was heartening. American heroism was alive and well, the country full of right-thinking men, eager to be of service. Their can-do spirit touched and inspired him—total strangers volunteering their time and talents to make a Whiter world.
San Diego, Boston, Minneapolis. Orlando, Phoenix, Colorado Springs. Once or twice a week, a new collection of photos appeared in his inbox. Victor picked through them carefully, long nights at the computer in his dime-store reading glasses, which never seemed strong enough. Every few months, he bought a new, more powerful pair.
9
The Russian kid worked out of a garage in North Quincy. Timmy pulled his new Honda Civic into the parking lot just as the shop was closing. As instructed, he parked behind the shop and texted: I’m here. And then, as an afterthought: This is Tim.
He got out of the car, twisting to stretch his back. He missed the legroom of his Ford Escape, the roomy seat that reclined to the perfect angle. After a week of driving the Civic, he’d developed a chronic twitch in his sacrum. In nearly every way, the Civic was a disappointment. Mechanically, aesthetically, it was a piece of crap. Its only virtue was its banality. The Civic was the sort of anonymous tin can a law-abiding citizen would drive.
His naked face tingled in the cold.
That morning, after a long shower, he’d studied his face in the mirror. It was not the face of a law-abiding citizen. The beard was the problem. The beard would have to go.
He had planned ahead, bought shaving cream and a razor—an item he hadn’t owned in years and that now, apparently, cost twenty dollars. First he went at the beard with a pair of scissors. Hair mounded in the sink like some exotic plankton.
What am I doing? he thought as he took the first swipe.
His face didn’t look the way he remembered it. The last time he saw it, the face was twenty-nine, the face of a new husband and father. His face had missed its thirties. Under all that hair it had sagged and softened into the face of a middle-aged man.
The garage door opened. A teenager with a patchy goatee waved him inside.
THE RUSSIAN KID CAME HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. THERE WAS A story Timmy had heard many times, now legendary among the weed sellers of Greater Boston. One of the kid’s customers, a Portaguee from Fall River, had been traveling west on I-84 when he was pulled over by a Connecticut statie, his SUV searched with a sniffer dog. The dog alerted at a spot behind the rear seat, the exact location where the Russian had installed a trap. The cop searched by hand, but found no loose wires or extra rivets or signs of jerry-rigging. The Portaguee drove back to Fall River a free man, with twenty pounds of product in his truck.
In the shop’s back office, they smoked a joint to get acquainted. Alex Voinovich was a skinny kid, possibly still growing at age nineteen. Since childhood he’d enjoyed ripping shit apart. A vacuum cleaner, a stereo, the thermostat in the snug apartment where he lived with his mother and sister. He was no more destructive than the average boy. He dismantled these machines not to destroy them, but to see how they worked.
He explained this emphatically, as though Timmy had argued otherwise. He seemed to enjoy explaining himself. In the daytime he installed car stereos at Def Jam Sound Design, a job he found unsatisfying. He did the same two or three generic installs over and over again, for punks with no sense of style; they cared only about the size of the speaker and the whomping bass line it could put out.